Audio Anecdotes: Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Digital Audio (v. 1) (Hardcover)

~ Ken Greenebaum (Editor), Ronen Barzel (Editor) "We create scales to measure things, to make them comprehensible, to allow us to make comparisons and computations on them and ultimately to communicate or..." (more)
Key Phrases: timbre trees, parsable variables, sound data chunk, Audio Anecdotes, Annotated Bibliography, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Audio Anecdotes does for the technology of computer sound what Graphics Gems did for computer graphics. It provides short articles on current research and development that deal with the production, capture, and manipulation of sound by computers. Its scope reaches from signal processing algorithms to essays on the creative process.

The contributors to this volume include researchers, recording engineers, and sound designers, as well as creative artists, and the articles reflect this broad spectrum of experience in dealing with:
The fundamentals: the physics, measurement and perception of sound
Signal processing: the mathematical manipulation of sound
Recording and playback of sound: including music, voice, and field recording
Synthesis: rendering sounds which never existed including the synthesis of musical instruments, voice, or noise (Foley Sound)
Signal processing applications: from compression techniques to signal detection and recognition
Computer techniques: efficiently implementing low latency high performance audio systems on digital computers
Music theory: the mathematics of both western and non-western music
Creative topics: composition and sound design
Nature, mind, and body: how sound exists in nature and affects the mind and body

This book will be an invaluable tool for anybody who uses digital sound in the creation of computer generated works, musicians, game developers, sound producers in movies and other media, and more.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: AK Peters; illustrated edition edition (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568811047
• ISBN-13: 978-1568811048
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,066,861 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sound junkie's delight, February 22, 2005

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Ken Greenebaum, who co-edited this book with Ronen Barzel, and wrote some of the articles, indicates in the preface that his motivation for putting Audio Anecdote together was to get the book he had wished for when he was starting out in digital audio. What he came up with is a wide-ranging collection of 25 articles on various aspects of sound--what it is, how we hear it, how it affects us, how it can be produced and altered, and how it can fool us. Some of the articles are rigorously scientific and technical, while others really are anecdotal and personal. Most significantly there is a wealth of information about the manipulation of sound, and there is some history of the development of our understanding of sound.

Most of the material is aimed at people who have an intense interest in audio, and audio reproduction and development, and who already have some knowledge. However this book also works well for a rank beginner (such as myself). The articles are clear and well-presented with many black and white illustrations, tables, diagrams, and mathematical formulas, not to mention programming code! There is a glossary and there is some overlap in the "anecdotes." For example, after a brief overview of the book, Greenebaum begins with an introductory-like article on what sound is and how we measure it. This is followed by a more technical article by Hesham Fouad entitled "Understanding the Decibel." This in turn is followed by Greenebaum's essay on "Sound Propagation." His exploration of the physics involved is clear and easy to read.

One of the many things that I discovered is that "When we speak on the telephone, a portion of our voice output is intentionally played back to us through the earpiece." Derek DiFilippo and Greenebaum explain in their article, "Perceivable Auditory Latencies" that "If we didn't have a clear sense of hearing ourselves speak, we would tend to talk louder and louder because we [would] assume that the listener on the other end...[wouldn't be able to] hear us either." (pp. 74-75)

I also learned (from Oscar-winning sound director Randy Thom in his article, "Designing a Movie for Sound") that the wise film maker should make his movie with sound in mind pre-production, not as something added on afterward. As Thom points out, in the great cinematic experiences, "the visual and aural elements are working together so well that it is nearly impossible to distinguish them." (p. 406) He mentions the opening of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and the bird attack scene in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), and the opening of David Fincher's Seven (1995) as examples. And I can't help adding the striking opening sequence from Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973) as another preeminent example of how sound can be as important, or even more important, than visuals in making a scene a lasting experience.

Included with the book is a CD that you can listen to with examples of sounds keyed to the discussions in the articles. The effect of latency ("the time between human input to a system...and system output," p. 65) and many other sound phenomena are demonstrated in the most effective way possible--by hearing them.

Special mention might be made of writer Adrienne Ross's personal contribution, "Understanding Hearing Losses and Hearing Gains...," which truly is an anecdote, beautifully written about her discovery of a hearing defect that she had lived with most of her life without realizing it. The fact that she had compensated for the defect by using her other senses, dramatically demonstrates how our experience of sound is not isolated from our other sensual experiences.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very practical tips for the audio engineer, July 13, 2004

By	"jon2980" (Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This book is a great book for anyone that works with digital audio. Audio Anecdotes introduces us to the practical side of audio. Just take a look at the Table Of Contents to see that there are papers on a wide variety of topics. Each of the 25 papers are written by experts in their respective fields, and each provides practical tips for creating great sounding audio. These tips aren't ideas that are obvious even to those with years of experience in the field- many of them come from years of research. In addition to the tips and techniques, Audio Anecdotes is filled with example code so you can play around and hear exactly what the authors are writing about. The CD-ROM comes with demos and explanations for most of the topics as well as the software to compile and run each demo. The software includes Caliper (a custom, text-based program used for controlling demo parameters), Flavor (a language, based on C++ and Java, great for multimedia applications), Octave (a language similar to MatLab), the PortAudio Library (a C library for audio I/O), and STK (Synthesis Toolkit- a set of C++ classes used for audio synthesis and processing). Whether you're going to use all this software or if you're simply looking for some practical mixing tips, I recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about the practical side of digital audio.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An anthology of essays by a wide variety of expert authors, July 9, 2004

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Audio Anecdotes: Tools, Tips, And Techniques For Digital Audio is an anthology of essays by a wide variety of expert authors concerning the exciting field of digital audio, lessons that can be learned from its past, discoveries directly applicable in the present, and anticipation of new changes in the future. Cutting-edge, practical, advice-filled instructionals include "Timbre Trees: Integrating Sounds and Images", "RampTest: Quantifying Audio Performance", "Designing a Movie for Sound", "Perceivable Auditory Latencies" and much more. A highly recommended supplementary educational text for anyone pursuing or involved in a career in the digital audio field, Audio Anecdotes is clearly an excellent addition to career-themed professional libraries as well as audio technology and technical reference shelves.